


The Impossibility of J/C

by Ika (Dolores_Crane)



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: F/F, M/M, Spoilers for all seasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:12:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dolores_Crane/pseuds/Ika
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, Jenna and Cally reflect on their relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Impossibility of J/C

**Author's Note:**

> Previously published in the paper zine _Sleer as Folk_. Also available at the [Hermit Library](http://www.hermit.org/blakes7/Library/SrchReq.cgi) and [Hip-Deep In Heroes](http://www.b7fic.com/index.php)

One

C

Cally was alone, running on the stationary track. The holographic walls close around her showed lush, hilly landscapes blurring past and the air was wet and humid. Her hair stuck to her face in straggles where it was coming out of its ponytail, and her shirt stuck to her thin torso, darkened with sweat. Her face was sharp and blank: her mind was neither.

She got off the treadmill, putting a towel round her neck and wiping her face with a corner of it. She wondered what purpose was served by continuing to keep up combat levels of fitness, now that her comrades had demobilized themselves. She wondered whether and when her pleasure in disciplining her body like this had become masochistic.

J

Jenna was working the bar: quick-stepping her complicated way through a clutter of people at tables, people dancing, people queuing for drinks; charming her way past jogged elbows and spilled drinks with an over-the-shoulder smile and a whirlwind flirtation of eyelashes. The lights bleached and dyed and bleached her pale hair; coloured shadows came and went across her face. Dancing, she was; or, better, flying, breathtakingly and three-dimensionally free, the underlying strictness of metal and circuitry invisible to anyone but her.

C/J

 _Jenna sits in the galley, staring into space, her hands round a mug of something hot as if it was the only thing holding her half-upright, as if it was the only thing between her and the Andromedan fleet. The galley comm is linked in to the flight deck and she is barely audible over Blake's voice, shouting, Avon's voice, shouting back._

 _"It's over, Cally," she says._

 _"What do you mean?"_

 _"Not us. Not just us. Everything."_

 _The small white room is like a well Cally is falling down forever. Fatigue is screwing with her vision and the straight lines and right angles are warping around her._

 _"What do you mean, Jenna?"_

 _"Blake's all there is left. He's all that matters now. Everything's gone insane, Cally."_

 _"You're exhausted," says Cally. "We'll talk later."_

 _Zen's voice over the comm: +Enemy strategy is now confirmed. Battle computers indicate full alien counterattack is underway.+_

 _Jenna sways as she rises, heading back to the flight deck. Cally is too late to steady her._

Two

J

Jenna sat down on the only chair left right-way-up in the bar, took out her penknife and opened a bottle, put her feet up on the small table, took a long drink, and sighed.

The sound of the door opening, when it opened, hardly startled her. She only shifted slightly in her seat to face whoever it was and checked that the handle of the gun in her boot was accessible.

"Jenna?"

"Who wants to know?"

"It's Shel."

Jenna smiled, swung her feet off the table, and said: "Get yourself a drink."

"I've got a commission for you," Shel said, flipping a chair one-handed off the next table over. She took a drink from the bottle in her other hand and sat straddling the chair, leaning her elbows on its back.

"Oh yes?"

Shel nodded. "Four warm bodies. Not carrying."

"More refugees from the cleanup in Freedom City?"

She hesitated. "Not this time, Jenna. They want passage inwards."

"Risky. They'd better not be carrying."

"Not so much as a packet of cigarettes."

"Well, I can do it, but it'll cost them."

"Ah," said Shel. "I don't think it will."

"Oh? Where are they going?"

Shel's eyes dropped. "Gavisos," she said. "Blake's base."

C

Towelling off, Cally shook the conversation she was having with Jenna ( _It's **not** just Blake, it never was, don't you see it couldn't be? There had to be something in you that..._ ) out of her head. The cabin seemed horribly silent without it, and something else - lonely?

She frowned a little, thinking about it. She supposed she hadn't seen anyone else for - she wasn't quite sure how long. Too long, then. She realized, too, that she didn't even know where they were going.

She pulled on a lavender jumpsuit and went down the empty corridors. The conversation in her head started up again. ( _But, Jenna..._ )

"Course, Zen," she said over it before she realized that the rest of the crew were on the flight deck and she should have spoken to them first.

+Course eight two eight zero four. Destination is the planet Earth.+

"Why Earth?" she asked, and as they explained she began to feel hollow and lost. _Nothing to fight for now but the dead, Avon?_

J/C

 _Jenna and Cally are sitting warm and close on the couch. Avon enters, takes a moment to arrange himself - feet square for confrontation, knees loose against the motion of the ship - looks through them and asks: "Where's Blake?"_

 _Jenna's chin goes up: steel and sparks in her voice. Avon tosses a data card onto the table: "Another of Blake's little schemes he hasn't thought fit to tell us about. You are not going to believe the target he has in mind."_

 _"The Federation weapons development base?" asks Cally demurely, and catches Jenna's look, swaying pleasantly dizzy as she absorbs the force of it._

 _"He obviously thought fit to tell someone about it."_

 _"Well, not exactly. I suggested it to him."_

 _"You suggested it to him?" Jenna drawls, settling herself more comfortably into the fight. "That's very keen of you," and Cally begins to burn slow and steady in the measure of Jenna's half-hidden heat, but before she can answer Vila has deflected her into a four-cornered argument about whether Blake will attack Central Control._

 _"Alone, probably," says Avon._

 _"I doubt that," says Jenna, tilting her head and brushing her hand against Cally's._

 _"He wouldn't be alone if you just left him," says Gan. Cally smiles obliquely at Jenna: Exactly. She lets Avon sharpen his claws on Gan and then goes on with what she was saying:_

 _"And for that attack we shall need all the weapons we can get."_

 _Jenna turns towards her. They look at each other for a second, balancing in anticipation, like fighters bowing to one another in the ring, like dancers the moment before the music starts; and then Blake walks in and lines himself up opposite Avon, talking over the women's heads to him: "And where better to get them than the weapons development base?"_

 _The energies in the room scatter and refocus along the line between Avon's face and Blake's face and a moment later the crew have shuffled, Cally next to Blake, Jenna in the centre of the couch, Avon behind her shoulder on the scan station._

 _Blake asks Jenna a question._

 _Avon answers him._

Three

J

The ship was vibrating in that odd, sideways way that meant it was stationery, and almost as impatient about it as Jenna.

"Come on," she muttered, drumming her fingers on the panel, "how long do these scans...?"

And then the alarm went off. And her hands seemed to have predicted it, because even while her mind was still paralysed with the shock and listening, stupefied, to the automated border voice ("The scans have detected. Weapons. Please hold your position and. Prepare to be boarded") her fingers were dancing to the right buttons, pushing the ship into hums and whines of movement.

"Two bolts launched and running," said Hez from behind her. The ship lurched and stuttered.

"Gavril, you little fucking idiot!" Jenna shouted. "I knew I shouldn't have..."

"Please clarify."

"Not you," she said to the flight computer, pushing her hair back out of her eyes. "Maintain full retro thrust on 2 and 4. Compute evasion co-ordinates on a two-point-five predictive and feed them to my station. Hez?"

"Yes?"

"Damage situation?"

"Inertia stabilizers are compromised. Outer hull's been breached. One more hit and the inner hull will go."

"Shit," said Jenna briefly. "Hang on. I'm going to roll her."

Behind Jenna in the tiny cockpit, Hez pushed her weight back and down into the seat, grabbed the arms and half-closed her eyes as the ship went into its insane spiral. Through her eyelashes she could see Jenna throwing her weight behind every twist on the controls, rolling and swaying as she tried to teach the unwieldy _Threefold_ to dance at a moment's notice. Beyond her, on the main screen, Gavisos loomed and faded, flared and darkened, as plasma bolts corkscrewed past and into its atmosphere.

C

Cally stood up off the edge of her bunk, and began taking down her sketches of Auron.

 _Regret is a part of life, but I keep it a small part. As you do, Jenna. As you have demonstrated you do not, Avon._

She hesitated for a moment when she had a stack of papers in her hand. She - they - had spent long enough calibrating losses: Auron, the first time. Blake. Jenna. Auron, again and forever and ever. Dayna's father, Avon's Anna, Tarrant's Deeta, whatever Vila had left behind at the City on the Edge of Worlds... all the deadness and defeat of fighting for nothing but the dead.

But no, she decided, she would not destroy them. She slid the pictures into a drawer and stood for a moment, taking a long breath, with her fingers on the handle.

Blake had known loss, he had grieved for the dead; and yet he had fought not for the dead but for the living and the coming-to-be. His fight, multiple and noisy, had spun and rippled outwards, not chased itself back down the same path to the forever dead.

As she had hoped to do, before Avon's grief had made it clear that _it_ was piloting the _Liberator_ from now on; after the short months of searching for Blake had come the long months of drifting, of going anywhere, it seemed, but along the lines of Blake's fight. As if Avon was still trying to argue with him, the only way he could, and as undeflectably as ever.

 _Jenna,_ she thought, _it may be that you were right_ , and she felt the conversation in her mind ending. It was time for her to stop talking to ghosts: for all of them to stop talking to ghosts.

J/C

 _"Hmmm?" says Jenna plaintively. She raises her head a little off the pillow, trying to catch Cally's eye._

 _Cally's face beside/above hers is maddeningly calm. In the corner of Jenna's eye, a muscle just below Cally's strong shoulder flexes tinily, relaxes, flexes, slow and regular, as her fingers, hooked just under the padding of Jenna's mons, circle slow and regular._

 _She blinks, looks at Jenna. "I'm sorry, Jenna," she says, smiling in her voice and at the corners of her mouth; "I don't know what you're thinking, you know."_

 _"Some telepath you are."_

 _"Ah," says Cally and slows her fingers a fraction more. "But you see, Jenna, 'telepathy' is not really an accurate name for the abilities I possess. It means, literally, 'suffering from afar', which does not describe... No," she interrupts herself, mock-solicitous, "you needn't move," swinging her knee up over Jenna's thigh, gently pressing it down and immobile against the bed. "Just... rest. That's right."_

 _Jenna smiles at her, lazy and amused, taking up the challenge._

 _"So you can't read minds. What can you do?"_

 _"Mind-reading," Cally declares, licking a fingertip and running it in a filigree swirl along the tendon under Jenna's arm, around the lower curve of her breast, in towards the hardening nipple, "is an overrated skill. Hardly necessary among human species, if one knows how to read faces, breathing, posture, movement. The sending technology developed on Auron is far more useful."_

 _"Technology?" Jenna is startled into listening to Cally's words instead of the rain-sound of her own body (the blood rushing in her ears, fizzing with pleasure, blossoming everywhere into sweat and wetness, as loud as drenching rain)._

 _"Of course. It is a communications technology. An untraceable, unbreakable code tailored to the individuals sending and receiving it. The Federation try to replicate it with machinery, but mechanical means are more vulnerable than the disciplined mind."_

 _Cally falls silent for a moment, returning Jenna to the prison of her nerves. Her orgasm, rattling on them like bars, stalks somewhere deep inside, faint and caged; waits like an echo from the future, the chord that will be struck when the strings have been tuned._

 _"There are other benefits," says Cally casually._

 _"Yes?"_

 _//Yes.// Cally's mouth over Jenna's, her tongue sliding swift between Jenna's teeth, her fingers moving firmer and faster._

 _In the pit of Jenna's stomach her orgasm growls, seeing the cage door opening._

Four

C

Cally closed the drawer, let her hands drop to her sides, squared her shoulders, and went to the flight deck.

She was lucky. Avon was there, alone, standing hunched over the screen at his station.

"Avon," said Cally, and he twitched, stabbed a button by the screen, turned and glared at her.

"Get out," he said unequivocally.

"Why? What's going on, Avon? I need to speak to you."

Avon took a deep breath. His face blanked itself as he exhaled. "I'm sorry, Cally," he said, with the excess of politeness he used to shield himself when he was close to breaking. "I need the flight deck to myself for some hours longer. Whatever it is you need to talk about, it will have to wait."

Cally looked at the unforthcoming back of his head as he turned back to lean over the screen, and the more telling set of his shoulders. Whatever it was, he would not be able to keep it to himself much longer, she thought. She shrugged and headed off to the teleport bay.

J

"I've put the word out to the rest of the Railroad that you're a liability," Jenna said. She was standing, hands on hips, over Gavril, who was sitting on the dusty floor of the tiny false room between the cargo hold and the engine room. In the hours since the battle, her anger had refined itself away into something colder and purer. "None of the main Resistance groups will carry you now. I'll put you down on the nearest neutral planet, and you'll have to make your own way to Gavisos if you can. Personally, I hope you don't make it."

Gavril's nostrils flared and his head went up. Picture of a Resistance Hero, tear tracks in the dust on his face, staring up at an implacable foe.

"You're a coward," he said defiantly. "Everybody knows about you. You abandoned Blake after the war. At least I had the courage to try and help him. He needs those weapons."

Jenna squatted down so that they were eye to eye. Behind Gavril, the three other boys shifted uncomfortably, watching.

"What Blake needs," Jenna said evenly, "is fewer little idiots like you pushing him further over the edge. Get yourself killed for the Cause by all means, but don't take me out with you, and don't put the whole operation at risk by setting off every Federation alarm in the sector on the approach to a major rebel base. Oh," she added, getting up, "and don't, for God's sake, think you can help him. He can't even help himself, any more."

"You would say that, wouldn't you?" Gavril shouted at Jenna as she started to coil herself through the door. "He's twice the man you'll ever be, however hard you try - _dyke_."

She glanced back at him from the other side of the door. "If you say another word to me before we reach Scipio-Four, you'll be leaving by the airlock instead of by the shuttle. And, by the way - " she started smiling - "you might be in for a surprise when you meet Blake. And Deva."

C/J

 _"Oh, just **fuck** , will you?" Jenna muttered over the diminuendo of Avon and Blake arguing their way off watch and down a corridor._

 _Cally looked at her. "I'm sorry?"_

 _"Don't tell me you hadn't noticed," Jenna said without looking up from her console. "I thought those two were the only ones who hadn't. I wish they would; pursuit ships feel like a nice rest after all the bickering."_

 _Cally thought for a moment, taking in the new information, and then burst out laughing. Jenna caught her eye and grinned._

 _"Hadn't you really noticed?"_

 _"Well, at first it seemed the most obvious explanation for their relationship, but since none of you have ever mentioned the possibility of same-sex attraction, I assumed that it either did not occur among humans, or was deeply taboo."_

 _"Oh, it's taboo all right," said Jenna cheerfully, "but some of us are a lot less precious about it than others." She winked at Cally._

Five

J

"No," said Jenna. "I'm sorry, Blake, but you're not going to change my mind."

"You'd be very welcome, you know."

She shook her head.

"Very well. Give my regards to Hez."

As she turned away, heading back to the _Threefold_ , he said: "Jenna?" and she turned back.

"You never did tell me why."

Jenna looked at him across the clearing. He looked more natural in the open, somehow, she thought. He had a knack for filling up enclosed spaces; but here the sky stretched infinite above him, the scrubby ground curved imperceptibly away under his feet, and the trees in the distance were taller than him, and older. Even here, she couldn't stay with him, but here she could meet his eyes, and tell him what he wanted to know. She sighed, and began.

"After the war," she said, "I should have stayed with _Liberator_. I left because I thought you were the last chance there was for some sort of end to - the whole horrible mess the galaxy had become. You were the only hope."

"And I let you down," Blake half-said, half-asked.

"Nothing so melodramatic. No, I realized how dangerous that made you. I've seen it a thousand times since. To so many people you're someone to die for, Blake; and to millions more you're someone to wait for. A Messiah, as someone once put it. I can't wait for you to save me - and I don't have to. I can be my own hope."

"Stay, Jenna. I think I need you around."

She smiled at him fondly, sadly, across the distance between them. "The Railroad needs me more. And Blake, you know it was never me you needed. At the least, you owe it to him to put the right name to what you've lost."

"As you do, Jenna?"

She didn't answer.

C

//Vila?//

And then the ground, walls, ceiling twitched and shuddered and she felt sudden heat blasting towards her and heard metal grinding and twisting in the last half-upright wall. She closed her eyes and as everything collapsed around her and she began to lose herself, she saw suddenly with absolute clarity that one can only lose once and the last two years had been nothing but the slow collapse after that first and only, fundamental, loss; that there was only one thing to regret.

Since that loss she had only been waiting for this moment; since that loss nothing could be helped.

As if she could cancel the ruin once the foundations had been mined, she called his name out across space, back across time.

J/C

...


End file.
